“Letters of recommendation for students are never easy to write. All faculty feel charged with telling the truth, but we also feel compelled to go over the top far enough that our student won’t seem damned with faint praise. And, as with grade point averages, the top gets higher every year. Is it possible to write too positive a letter anymore? No, it is not.
Yet traditional language has lost its lift. If we say that a student is ‘good,’ then obviously that student is not ‘great,’ and we will have just tossed him on the dung heap of the unexceptional. But if we write ‘great,’ then we invite the thought, how great? Is she greater than any student in the last year? Than any student in the last century? Than simply the kid beside her in class? What? So we ratchet up: ‘remarkable’-but in what ways exactly?
If you’re like I was, you find yourself climbing the ladder of hyperbole but never getting anywhere, except depressed. You love your students and want to send them happily and meritoriously on their way, but they are, alas, often far from perfect. Because a once-reasonable recommendation is now an unreasonable insult, the question is how to write improbable praise that tells the truth in a way you can live with.
One word, my friends: blurbs. What sells books can sell students, and, with a little care, hyperbole and your conscience can coexist. In the hot air that has become the letter of recommendation, either we learn to ride the thermals or we drop from the sky faster than a midlist first novel with no marketing budget, yanking our students down with us. Time to study up.”
More at http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/2005/05ja/05jafelt.htm